Projects: set up and manage a website in Serpel

What is a project in Serpel?

A project is the container for everything about one domain: crawls and the audit score, tracked keywords, competitors, AI prompts, keyword lists, reports, tasks and the connections to Search Console or web analytics. Every project has its own market (a country and a language), its own settings and its own members.

Projects belong to a workspace, and your plan decides how many projects the workspace can hold. Work that runs in a project is charged to the workspace that owns it. Credits and billing explains plans, credits and prices.

How do you create a project in Serpel?

You create a project from a domain. Serpel normalises the domain, creates the project with you as its owner and opens its overview. Account connections to Google, Bing, PostHog or Plausible that you already made under Settings → Integrations are matched to the new project in the background.

1. 1

   Open the new project dialog.

   Open the project menu at the top of the sidebar and choose New project. On the All projects page you can also use the Project button, or Create first project if you have no project yet.

2. 2

   Enter the domain.

   Type the domain into Domain, for example example.com, or paste a full address. A path in the address becomes the start URL of the crawl.

3. 3

   Name it if you like.

   Name (optional) is only a label. Without it, Serpel uses the domain as the name.

4. 4

   Choose the market.

   Pick the Country and Language that the site targets. The dialog starts with Germany and German.

5. 5

   Create the project.

   Click Create project. Serpel opens the overview of the new project, where the Getting started checklist waits for you.

Which domains does Serpel accept?

Serpel accepts public domain names. It strips www. from the domain, but the start URL for crawls keeps the host, path and query that you typed. Rank checks match your domain and its subdomains.

You cannot create a second project for a domain that you already have a project for. Serpel then names the existing project, and the CLI returns its ID. The domain cannot be changed after creation, so create a new project for a different domain.

Which country and language should you choose?

Serpel supports 43 countries and 22 languages. The market of the project is the default for new tracked keywords and for keyword research. Each tracked keyword keeps the market it was added with, so changing the project market later does not touch existing keywords. See rank tracking for how markets, locations and devices combine.

How many projects can you create?

The limit counts the active projects in your workspace. When you reach it, the dialog shows a usage meter, Create project is disabled and the API answers with HTTP 403 and plan_limit. Deleting a project frees its slot, and a larger plan raises the limit under Settings → Billing. The other per-project limits follow the same plan.

What does the project overview show?

Open a project from All projects or from the project menu in the sidebar to reach its overview. The page fills as you add data, and each section links to the page that explains it:

• Getting started is the onboarding checklist. It stays until all five steps are done or you click Hide.
• The monitoring strip shows Monitoring active or Monitoring off, the Frequency, the Last run, the Next run and the Email report status. Latest report opens the newest monitoring report, and Check now starts a monitoring run immediately.
• Since the last run counts the keywords that moved up or dropped, new page-1 rankings, prompts where ChatGPT cites you and new issues on the website.
• The opportunities widget lists the best opportunities for the site.
• Trends charts Visibility, Clicks from Google, Visitors and Audit score for Last 7 days, Last 28 days (the default) or Last 3 months. Charts for Search Console and web analytics appear once those are connected.
• Cards for clicks, competitors, visitors and positions summarise the other pages, and To do on your website lists the most important issues of the latest crawl.

What is on the Getting started checklist?

The checklist updates itself from your real data. Hide stores your choice in a cookie of your browser, so it stays hidden only on that browser.

Which settings does a project have?

Open the project menu in the sidebar and choose Settings. The sidebar then lists the project sections General, Ranking check, Monitoring and Members. Editors and owners can change these settings, except for the domain. After you change a value, a bar with Cancel and Save appears, and nothing is stored until you click Save.

General: name, market and crawl

Ranking check: how rankings are read

The sidebar calls this section Ranking check, while the heading on the page says “Rank check”. Both are the same settings.

Monitoring: schedules, reports and webhooks

Frequency is Manual only, Daily, Every 3 days or Weekly, and Time is the hour a scheduled run starts. The hour is in Europe/Berlin time, not in your local time. Daily needs the Pro plan. A forecast beneath the fields shows the credits per month, and Weekly crawl adds a crawl every Monday at the same hour. The section also holds the Email report recipients and the Slack and Discord report rows. Monitoring and reports covers all of them.

Who can see and change a project?

Roles belong to a project, not to the workspace. Whoever creates a project becomes its owner. Everyone else is an editor or a viewer.

How do you add members during the beta?

Owners see an Invite member button under Members, with an email address and the roles Viewer and Editor. During the beta, the request only succeeds when a Serpel administrator sends it, so ask the Serpel team to add the person instead. The person needs an existing, active Serpel account, because there are no email invitations. Role changes follow the same rule, and you cannot hand the owner role to someone else.

Owners can remove a member at any time with the trash icon next to the name. The member loses access at once, and the connections that member created for the project are removed too. Everyone can read the list of members, in the dashboard and with serpel projects members list.

How do you delete a project?

1. 1

   Open the project settings.

   Choose Settings in the project menu and scroll to Delete project. Only owners see this section.

2. 2

   Click Delete project.

   A dialog asks you to type the domain of the project as a confirmation.

3. 3

   Confirm.

   Click Delete permanently. Serpel returns you to All projects.

The project disappears at once. Queued jobs are cancelled, running jobs are asked to stop, the schedule is switched off and the project slot becomes free. Serpel removes the stored data for good about 30 days after the deletion. The app has no restore button, so export what you need first with the history and exports tools.

How do you manage projects from the CLI, API and MCP?

Every project action in the dashboard has a CLI command and a REST API endpoint. The commands below create, list, change and delete projects. Changing and deleting follow the same roles as the dashboard.

serpel projects create --domain example.com --country US --language en
serpel projects list
serpel projects show <id>
serpel projects update <id> --rank-depth 50 --schedule weekly --schedule-hour 6
serpel projects members list --project <id>
serpel projects delete <id> --yes

The API needs a token with the projects:write scope to create or change a project and projects:read to read one. A token that is limited to certain projects cannot create new ones.

curl -X POST https://serpel.app/api/v1/projects \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SERPEL_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain": "example.com", "name": "Example", "country": "US", "language": "en"}'

The MCP server can read projects but not create or change them. list_projects returns your projects with ID, domain, market and role, and get_project_overview summarises one of them. The Claude Code guide lists all tools.

What if a project does not behave as expected?

Where to go next